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With an exciting battle between a brother and sister, the Breath of Fresh Air campaign’s ‘Tell a friend’-contest came to an end on 20 December 2010 midnight.

Over 10,000 people have participated in the Breath of Fresh Air campaign since its launch in April 2010, adopting turbines all over Europe or voting for those their friends adopted.

The top five countries for adoptions were Spain (491 turbines adopted), Italy (433), UK (427), France (420) and Germany (231). But wind energy enthusiasts adopted turbines everywhere in Europe: from the Faroe Islands to Turkey, from Norway to Portugal, from Poland to Switzerland.

Complicated things sometimes can be explained in only a few words – check out EWEA’s FAQs to find the answers to your wind questions you were always looking for.

When talking about wind turbines and their capacity – that is, their ability to generate electricity — the word megawatt is used all the time. Capacity is measured in watts which is a very small unit, so people talk instead about kilowatts (1 kW = 1,000 watts), megawatts (1 MW = 1 million watts), and gigawatt (1 GW = 1 billion watts) when they want to describe the capacity of generating units like wind turbines.

The electricity production and consumption, on the other hand, is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh). A kilowatt hour means one kilowatt (1,000 watts) of electricity produced or consumed for one hour. That means one 50-watt light bulb left on for 20 hours consumes one kilowatt-hour of electricity (50 watts x 20 hours = 1,000 watt-hours = 1 kilowatt hour).

If you’ve ever asked yourself, or want to show someone else, how a wind turbine works, check out EWEA’s easy-to-use interactive tool.

It allows you to play with the three main variables that determine how much electricity a wind turbine can produce:

The wind speed: Stronger winds produce more energy. Wind turbines generate energy at wind speeds starting from 4 metres per second (a gentle breeze) up to speeds of 30 metres per second (a violent storm). Over 30 metres per second (which happens rarely), the turbine is stopped from turning.

Almost 10,000 people have taken part in the EWEA 2010 campaign by adopting wind turbines or voting for the ones their friends had adopted in order to show their support for wind energy.

The ‘Breath of fresh air’ campaign is coming to an exciting point in just a few days: EWEA will be able to announce the two winners of the ‘tell a friend’ contest who will win a trip to Denmark and Switzerland.

One prize is a weekend in Copenhagen including a wind farm visit organised by the Danish Wind Industry Association. Denmark is the world’s wind energy pioneer with more than 20% of its electricity being produced by wind. Denmark is also home to major wind turbine manufacturers and its capital, home to the oldest monarchy in the world, has numerous museums, world-class modern architecture and a network of canals and cobbled squares that will take you back in time.